Brunello Cucinelli Celebrates 40 Years

In the rolling hills of Umbria, Italy, Brunello Cucinelli has built his city upon a hill—literally. The 65-year-old Italian designer with a penchant for quoting Socrates and Saint Benedict has been painstakingly restoring a medieval village called Solomeo, all the while transforming a quiet rural community into a thriving manufacturing center.

The village of Solomeo

Courtesy Brunello Cucinelli

For more than two decades, a 14th-century castlecum- factory was the unlikely provenance of gorgeous cashmere separates now carried at more than 126 Brunello Cucinelli stores around the world. In this textile utopia—where employees are paid 20 percent above the national average—Cucinelli, the son of a cement factory worker, has rebuilt squares, repaved streets, and added a theater and a library.

From left: Brunello Cucinelli’s “A Tribute to Human Dignity” and the theater in Solomeo

Courtesy Brunello Cucinelli

“My main source of inspiration was the teary eyes of my father when he used to be humiliated and offended at work,” he says.Now Cucinelli is setting his sights beyond the walls of SoloBmeo’s honey-colored castle. Due to the brand’s exponential growth, the company headquarters was moved permanently in 2010 to the valley below the village. “This area wasn’t so gracious,” Cucinelli says of land that had been filled with industrial buildings and warehouses. “So we decided to embellish it.” Never content to do anything by half measures, Cucinelli embarked on an ever-so-modestly titled “Project for Beauty,” to be completed this fall.

Looks from the Fall 2018 presentation

Shutterstock/Studio D

The headquarters will be encircled by a large garden, and an agricultural park will feature fruit orchards, golden fields of wheat and silvery expanses of alfalfa, a maze-shaped vineyard, a winery, and an olive grove with the trees planted in a circle to represent the shape of the world. But perhaps the pièce de résistance is the monument A Tribute to Human Dignity, which was built from the same marble used by Michelangelo. Says Cucinelli, “I think it will still be standing in a thousand years.”

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